Canada’s contribution to arts, technology is vast

Canada’s 150 birthday is July 1. To help celebrate, I recommend eating some poutine, washing it town with a cold Ex, and topping it off with a beaver tail. If those delicacies sound foreign to you, no worries – we can also celebrate the technology contributions from my home, the Great White North!

Everyone knows Canada is the source of winter cold fronts, but it’s also the birthplace of ice hockey, Dudley Do-Right and the Mounties, and extreme politeness. It’s also given us Captain Kirk (William Shatner), Austin Powers (Mike Myers), and countless Titanic karaoke performances (Celine Dion – sorry about that last one).

Canada is not just home base for countless comedians, musicians, and athletes now in the United States. It’s also where some of our most important scientific inventions came from. Let’s start with insulin, a discovery that literally saved my life. The 1923 Nobel prize in medicine was awarded to Banting (working with Best) and Macleod in Toronto for their research on injectable insulin. Until their work, Type I (insulin-dependent) diabetes was a death sentence. We now use synthetic insulin that closely mimics the body’s natural insulin, created through a process of recombinant DNA manufacturing, to help manage this chronic disease.

Skipping ahead over half a century, and switching domains from medicine to aerospace, Canadian engineers developed the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System (SRMS), which is better known as the Canadarm. It is a collection of robotic arms that were used on the Space Shuttle orbiters to manipulate large payloads. The newer version, Canadarm2, is currently used on the International Space Station. Robotics is increasingly important for automated space travel and the Canadarm has led the way.

If you enjoy large-screen summer movies in IMAX format, you can thank the pioneering work from the company’s founders at Expo 67. The Expo took place in Montreal to celebrate Canada’s centenary. I still vaguely recall being pushed in a stroller around the busy complex (I have clearer memories of Expo 86 in Vancouver), particularly the Biosphere, a giant metallic globe that housed the United States’ pavilion for the 1967 world fair. Today, IMAX theaters are commonplace.

Lastly, we can thank Alexander Graham Bell for inventing the telephone in 1876. His famous words to his assistant were the first ever to be transmitted electronically: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” Little did Bell know that over a hundred years later his new device would power a communications revolution and an app ecosystem.

This weekend I’m going to binge watch some “Rocky and Bullwinkle.” Maybe have a smoked meat sandwich and a Nanaimo bar for dessert. Good idea, eh?

Scott Tilley is a professor at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. Contact him at TechnologyToday@srtilley.com.

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